(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 9 November 2025 9:00, UK
Perhaps the biggest positive to come from Mike Myers playing his first leading role in a movie for almost 20 years when Shrek 5 releases in the summer of 2027 is that he was restricted solely to the recording booth, dramatically reducing the chances of him making a poor impression on yet another collaborator.
That’s not to say it won’t happen, since he cost the original film millions of dollars in additional costs when he decided very late in the day that he wanted to re-record all of the character’s dialogue with the Scottish brogue he’d adopted in How I Married an Axe Murderer, which was quite literally a billion-dollar idea.
The odds of Myers pissing someone off are never zero, though, and it’s become a recurring habit. Despite his popularity among audiences during his 1990s heyday, relationships weren’t quite so rosy behind the scenes, with the actor, comedian, and Saturday Night Live veteran leaving a trail of destruction in his wake.
Whether he was sabotaging Penelope Spheeris out of the director’s job on Wayne’s World 2, getting sued for abandoning a screenplay he’d written himself, or weathering decades of estrangement from Dana Carvey after his long-time friend and co-star accused him of plagiarising Dr Evil, he doesn’t have the best reputation in Hollywood.
One co-star who definitely never wants to see him again is Amy Hill, who played Mrs Kwan in The Cat in the Hat. “He is like a little hermit,” she told The AV Club. “He would come in and, I guess, be in hair and makeup. We would wait. I’d be there at the crack of dawn, waiting. We would all be waiting for Mike Myers to come.”
The star kept himself hidden away from the rest of the cast, and even though it made a little sense due to the bulky and uncomfortable costume he had to wear, Hill didn’t care for his professionalism, or lack thereof. “It was so weird. It was just the worst. I was miserable,” she said. “I just thought it was really rude for him to not take all of us into consideration.”
Despite only making The Cat in the Hat so that he didn’t face a potentially pricey lawsuit, Hill makes it sound an awful lot like Myers commandeered the production, noting that first-time feature director Bo Welch “deferred to Mike so much,” lurking over the filmmaker’s shoulder and influencing his decisions.
“It was just a horrible, nightmarish experience,” she summarised. “I don’t think he got to know anybody. He’d just be with his people and walk away. People would come, and he’d stand there. There was this guy who held his chocolates in a little Tupperware. Whenever he needed chocolate, he’d come running over and give him a chocolate. That’s what divas are like, I guess. Or people who need therapy.”
She wasn’t the first person to have a miserable time working on a Myers-led picture, but imagine being the poor guy who was employed specifically to carry around a plastic container full of chocolate and feed it to him as and when required.
Related Topics